"Free Money."

"Human Greed."

I think we can track many of our problems back to that; in a sense, it's almost always the inevitable "pink elephant in the room" nobody talks about, or wants to look directly at.

And I think we can track them back to the fact that the creators of Steemit made the same mistake every single rewards for content site has ever made: They had a beautiful idea, but grossly underestimated the sheer depth and numbers of human greed and selfishness.

I was writing a comment to @schattenjaeger elsewhere, and used the analogy of tossing a handful of coins into a crowd on a busy street. A mad scramble ensues, and fights will even break out. Even though the few pennies and dimes gained actually won't materially affect anyone's well-being. And yet? The FEW venues that persist in "rewarding people" are things like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the "MicroWorkers" site where people are given fractions of a cent for licking on links and other meaningless stuff. And they have hundreds of thousands of active users...

... as an illustrative aside, those sites were materially involved in turning the recent ByteBall airdrop into a circus... because they are all about "How do we bleed and manipulate every last cent out of a legitimate and well-meaning system."

Do I sound cynical? No, I've just observed the same thing over and over and over again, for 20-odd years.

As for the slowness of developments from STINC?

If history is anything to go by — and again, I've seen this many times — it's mostly a result of them scrambling to do "damage control" on what's happened, instead of focusing on new features. As a metaphor, you have great plans to sail across the Pacific, but you get 50 miles out to sea only to discover that your entire effort has to go into plugging holes in the hull. Consumes resources and puts a damper on the party.

As for Dan and Steemit 2.0 on EOS, not so worried... because he will STILL make the mistake of underestimating greed, and the sheer number of "penny miners" out there. It might be a different path to the problems, but the outcome will be the same.

Best we can do is just entrench here and slowly build our SP; only vote for those who actually CARE... the way I see it is that every "responsibly owned" Steem is a Steem NOT in the hand of a greedy rapist.